I will have to act as if I don't love her, as if I have no feelings for her at all. So I told myself while shaving Thursday morning. At ten-thirty I was to call at the Actons' to resume Nora's analysis. I knew I could have her. But that would be exploitation, manipulation, taking advantage of her therapeutic vulnerability – violating the oath of care I took when I became a doctor.
It is impossible to describe what ideas come to mind when I picture this girl, and I picture her nearly every waking moment. Well, not impossible, but inadvisable. What I literally cannot describe is the hollowness in my lungs when I am out of her presence. It is as if I were dying from the want of her.
I feel like Hamlet, paralyzed. With this difference: I feel I will die if I do not act, while Hamlet feels he will die if he does. For Hamlet, 'to be' is not to act. To take action is to die; it is 'not to be':
To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them. To die…
In other words, 'to be' is merely 'to suffer' one's fate, do nothing and thereby live, while 'not to be' is to act, 'to take arms' and 'die.' Because taking action means death, Hamlet says he knows why he has not acted: the fear of death, his soliloquy concludes, or of something after death,' has made him a coward and 'puzzled' his will.
Thus for Hamlet, 'to be' is stasis, suffering, cowardice, inaction, whereas 'not to be' is linked to courage, enterprise, action. Or so everyone has always understood the speech. But I wonder. Yes, in the end, when at last Hamlet acts against his uncle, he will die. Perhaps he knows this is his fate. But being cannot be equated with inaction. Life and action are too much one. To be cannot mean to do nothing. It cannot. Hamlet is paralyzed because, for him, acting has Somehow been equated with not being – and this false equation, this spurious equivalence, has never been fully understood.
But because of Freud, I can no longer think of Hamlet without thinking of Oedipus, and I fear something similar has begun to afflict my feelings for Miss Acton as well. If Freud is right about Miss Acton wishing to sodomize her own father, I believe I couldn't stand it. I know: this is wholly irrational on my part. If Freud is right, everyone has such wishes. No one can help it, and no one ought to be reviled for it. Nevertheless, the moment I entertain the conjecture in Miss Acton's case, I lose my capacity to love her. I lose my hold on love entirely: how can human beings be loved if we carry within us such repugnant desires?
Thursday morning began in uproar at the Acton house. Nora woke at daybreak, staggered out of bed, threw open her door, and fell headlong over Mr Biggs, who was asleep in his chair just outside her bedroom. The news was spread, the alarm sounded: Miss Acton had been attacked in the night.
The two patrolmen posted outside bumbled up the stairs, then down, storming about, accomplishing little. Dr Higginson was summoned once more. The well- intentioned old doctor, visibly distressed at Nora's having been victimized yet again and embarrassed by the location of her burn, gave the girl a soothing ointment she might apply as needed. He thereupon took his leave, shaking his head, assuring the family that she had suffered no other hurt. More policemen arrived on the scene. Detective Littlemore, who had fallen asleep at his desk the night before, got there at eight.
The detective found Nora and her distraught parents in the girl's bedroom. Uniformed officers were examining the carpeted floor and windows. Littlemore handed his dusting equipment to one of the men and instructed him to see if there were any serviceable fingerprints on the doorknob, bedposts, or windowsill. Nora was perched on a corner of her bed, the unmoving center of the whirlwind, still in her nightgown, hair disheveled, her eyes dazed and uncomprehending. Her statement was taken again and again.
It was George Banwell, she told them every time. It was George Banwell with a cigarette and a knife in the nighttime. Wasn't anyone going to arrest George Banwell? That question provoked anxious protests from Mr and Mrs Acton. It couldn't have been George, they said; it couldn't possibly have been. How could Nora be absolutely sure in the middle of the night?
Littlemore had a problem. He wished he had something else on Banwell other than the girl's evidence. After all, Miss Acton's memory was not exactly rock solid. Worse, even she admitted she couldn't really see the man in her room last night; it had been too dark. What she said, and Littlemore wished she hadn't put it this way, was that she 'could just tell' it was Banwell. If Littlemore had Banwell arrested, the mayor would not be happy. His Honor wouldn't like it if Banwell were so much as picked up- for questioning.
All in all, the detective figured he'd better wait for the mayor's orders. 'If you wouldn't mind, Miss Acton,' he said, 'could I ask you a question?'
'Go ahead,' she said.
'Do you know a William Leon?'
'I'm sorry?'
'William Leon,' said Littlemore. 'Chinaman. Also known as Leon Ling.'
'I know no Chinamen, Detective.'
'Maybe this will jog your memory, miss,' said the detective. From his vest, he withdrew a photograph and handed it to the girl. It was the picture he had removed from Leon's apartment, showing the Chinese man with two young women. One of them was Nora Acton.
'Where did you get this?' the girl asked.
'If you could just tell me who he is, miss,' said Littlemore. 'It's real important. He may be dangerous.'
'I don't know. I never knew. He insisted on having his picture taken with Clara and me.'
'Clara?'
'Clara Banwell,' said Nora. 'That's her there, next to him. He was one of Elsie Sigel's Chinamen.'
Both these names were acutely interesting to Detective Littlemore. Unless William Leon had a penchant for Elsies, he had just identified not only the other woman in the photograph, but the author of the letters found in the trunk – and, quite possibly, the dead girl found along with them.
'Elsie Sigel,' Littlemore repeated.' Could you tell me about her, miss? A Jewish girl?'
'Good heavens, no,' said Nora. 'Elsie did missionary work. You must have heard of the Sigels. Her grandfather was quite famous. There is a statue of him in Riverside Park.'
Littlemore whistled inwardly. General Franz Sigel was indeed famous, a Civil War hero who became a popular New York politician. At his funeral in 1902, more than ten thousand New Yorkers came to pay their respects to the old man, laid out in full-dress uniform. The granddaughters of Civil War generals were not supposed to write amorous letters to the managers of Chinatown restaurants. They were not supposed to write letters to Chinamen at all. He asked how Miss Sigel was connected to William Leon.
Nora told him what little she knew. Last spring, she and Clara had volunteered their services to one of Mr Riis's charitable associations. They had visited tenement families all over the Lower East Side, offering what help they could. One Sunday, in Chinatown, they had come across Elsie Sigel teaching a Bible class. A pupil of hers had a camera. Nora remembered him well, because he was so different from the others – much better dressed and better spoken. Nora had never learned his name, but Elsie seemed to know him well. It was because of his apparent friendship with Elsie that Clara and she felt they could not refuse his persistent requests for a photograph.
'Do you know where Miss Sigel lives, Miss Acton?' asked Littlemore.
'No, but I doubt you would find her at home anyway, Detective,' said Nora. 'Elsie ran away with a young man in July. To Washington, everyone says.'
Littlemore nodded. He thanked Nora; then he asked Mr Acton if there was a telephone he could use. When he got through to headquarters, he left instructions to track down the parents of one Elsie Sigel, granddaughter of General Franz Sigel. If the Sigels confirmed that they had not seen their daughter since July, they were to be taken down to the morgue.
Returning to Nora's bedroom, Littlemore found only Nora and Mrs Biggs within. The last policeman was just leaving the room: he told Littlemore that he hadn't found any prints at all on the windows or bedposts. As for the doorknobs, too many people had been in and out. Mrs Biggs was attempting to restore order to the mess the patrolmen had left; Nora remained exactly as she was when he had left. Littlemore studied the bedroom. 'Miss Acton,' he said, 'how do you think the man got in here last night?'
'Well, he must have – why, I don't know.'
It was, Littlemore reflected, certainly a puzzle. There were only two doors to the Acton house, the front and the back. These had been manned all night long by two sturdy patrolmen, who swore that no one had passed through either one. To be sure, old Biggs had fallen asleep at the switch. This was acknowledged by all parties. But Biggs had smartly positioned his chair right up against the girl's bedroom door; that was why she had fallen over him in the morning. It would have been very difficult for anybody to get past Biggs without disturbing him.
Could the intruder have climbed in through a window? Nora's bedroom was on the second floor. There was no obvious way the man could have scaled the house, and, because her bedroom faced the park, anyone attempting such a feat would have been in plain view of the officer stationed out front. Could he have lowered himself from the roof? It was conceivable. The roof was accessible from the adjacent buildings. But the neighbors swore that their houses had not been broken into last night. Also, it seemed to Littlemore that a large man would have had a pretty hard time squeezing through one of Nora's windows.
It was during Detective Littlemore's inspection of these windows – which showed no sign of human ingress or egress – that cracks began to appear in Nora's story. The first was the discovery, by Mrs Biggs, of an extinguished cigarette buried in Nora's wastepaper basket. The cigarette had lipstick on it. Mrs Biggs seemed very surprised. The detective was too.
'This yours, miss?' he asked.
'Of course not,' said Nora. 'I don't smoke. I don't even own any lipstick.'
'What's that on your lips now?' asked Littlemore.
Nora clapped her hands to her mouth. Only then did she remember seeing Banwell put lipstick on her. Somehow she had forgotten this peculiar fact before. The whole episode was so blurred, so strangely cloudy in her mind. She told the detective what Banwell had done. She said he must have put lipstick on the cigarette too and thrown it into the basket before he left. She did not mention the most peculiar feature of her memory: that she saw Banwell from above rather than below. But she did insist that she owned no makeup at all.
'Mind if I have a look around your room, Miss Acton?' asked Littlemore.
'Your men have been examining my room for the last hour,' she answered.
'Would you mind, miss?'
'All right.'
None of the patrolmen thus far had searched Nora's own belongings. Littlemore did so now. In the lowest drawer of her vanity, he found several cosmetic items, including face powder, a vial of perfume, and a lipstick. There was also a pack of cigarettes.
'Those aren't mine,' said Nora. 'I don't know where they came from.'
Littlemore brought his officers back to the room to conduct a more thorough examination. A few minutes later, on an upper shelf of the girl's closet, hidden under a pile of winter sweaters, a policeman found something unexpected. It was a short, bent-handled whip. Littlemore was unfamiliar with medieval practices of scourging, but even he could see that this particular kind of whip would allow a flogging in hard-to-reach places – such as the back of the flogger.
Good thing we didn't arrest Banwell, thought Jimmy Littlemore.
The detective didn't know what to think, however, when another officer presented him with a discovery from the backyard. The patrolman had climbed the tree to see if it was possible to get from there to the roof. It wasn't possible, but on his way down, the patrolman saw what he thought was a coin: a small, shiny metal circle, glinting deep in a notch of the tree trunk about a foot off the ground. He handed the item to Littlemore: a man's round gold tiepin, monogrammed, with a thread of white silk clinging to its catch. The initials on that tiepin were GB.
Brill was late to breakfast for once. When he appeared, he looked dreadful: unshaven, frightened, one of his collar points sticking up. Rose, he told Freud, Ferenczi, and me, had been insomniac all night. An hour ago, he had given her some laudanum; he had hardly slept himself. He said he needed to speak with us out of public view. We therefore repaired, the four of us, to Freud's room, leaving a message downstairs for Jones and another for Jung – although none of us knew whether Jung was even in the hotel.
'I can't do it,' Brill burst out, when we got to Freud's room. 'I'm sorry, but I just can't. I already told Jelliffe.' He was referring, apparently, to his translation of Freud's book. 'If it were only me, I promise you – but I can't endanger Rose. She's all I have. You see that, don't you?'
We induced him to sit. When he calmed down enough to speak coherently, Brill tried to persuade us that the cinders in his home were connected to the biblical telegrams he had been receiving. 'You saw her,' he said, referring to Rose again. 'They turned her into a pillar of salt. It was in the telegram, and it happened.'
'Someone deliberately delivered ash to your home?' asked Ferenczi. 'Why?'
'As a warning,' answered Brill.
'From whom?' I asked.
'The same people who had Prince arrested in Boston.
The same people who are trying to block Freud's lectures at Clark.'
'They know where you live how?' said Ferenczi.
'How do they know Jones is sleeping with his maid?' was Brill's reply.
'We mustn't jump to conclusions,' said Freud, 'but it is certainly true that someone has acquired a great deal of private information about us.'
Brill slipped an envelope from his vest, from which he withdrew a tiny jagged square of burnt paper, with typing visible on it. A ü (with an umlaut) was distinctly visible on it. A space or two to its right was a letter that might have been a capital H. Nothing else was visible.
'I found this in my living room,' said Brill. 'They burned my manuscript. Freud's manuscript. And they put the ashes in my apartment. They will burn the whole building down next time. It's in the telegram: a "rain of fire"; "stop before it is too late." If I publish Freud's book they're going to kill Rose and me.'
Ferenczi remonstrated with him, arguing that his fears were out of all proportion to the events, but Freud interrupted. 'Whatever the explanation, Abraham,' he said, placing a hand on Brill's shoulder, 'let us put the book aside for now. The book can wait. It is not as important to me as you are.'
Brill hung his head and put his own hand over Freud's. I thought he might be about to cry. Just then a porter knocked at the door and entered with coffee and a tray of pastries, which Freud had ordered. Brill straightened up.
He accepted a cup of coffee. He seemed enormously relieved by Freud's last remarks, as if a great burden had been lifted from him. Blowing his nose, he said, in an altogether different tone – his old, familiar, half-serious note – 'It's not me you should be worried about anyway. What about Jung? Are you aware, Freud, that Ferenczi and I believe Jung to be psychotic? It is our considered medical opinion. Tell him, Sandor.'
'Well, psychotic I would not say,' Ferenczi responded. 'But I do see evidence of potential breakdown.'
'Nonsense,' said Freud. 'What evidence?'
'He is hearing voices,' Ferenczi replied. 'He is complaining Brill's floor is soft under feet. Conversation is broken. And is telling everyone he meets that grandfather was falsely accused of murder.'
'I can think of explanations for that other than psychosis,' said Freud. I could see he had something particular in mind, but he didn't elaborate. I was wondering whether to bring up Jung's startling interpretation of Freud's Count Thun dream, but I was concerned that Freud had not divulged it to Brill and Ferenczi. I need not have been.
'And on top of that, he says you dreamt about him ten years ago!' cried Brill. 'The man is mad.'
Freud took a breath and replied. 'Gentlemen, you know as well as I that Jung entertains certain beliefs about clairvoyance and the occult. I am glad you share my skepticism on that subject, but Jung is hardly alone in taking a broader view.'
'A broader view,' said Brill. 'If I took that broad a view, you would tell me I was delusional. He takes a broader view of the Oedipal complex too. He no longer accepts the sexual aetiology, you know.'
'You wish that to be so,' replied Freud calmly, 'so that I will throw him off. Jung accepts the sexual theory without reserve. In fact, he is presenting a case of infantile sexuality at Clark next week.'
'Really? Have you asked him what he intends to say at Fordham?'
Freud did not answer but eyed Brill narrowly.
'Jelliffe told me that he and Jung have been talking it over, and Jung is very concerned about overemphasizing the role of sex in the psychoneuroses. That was his word: overemphasizing.'
'Well, certainly he does not want to overemphasize it,' snapped Freud. 'I don't want to overemphasize it either. Listen to me, both of you. I know you have suffered from Jung's anti-Semitism. He spares me and therefore takes it out with greater energy on you. I also know very well – I assure you – about Jung's difficulties with the sexual theory. But you must remember: it was harder for him to follow me than it was for you. It will be harder for Younger here as well. A Gentile must overcome much greater inner resistance. And Jung is not only a Christian, he is a pastor's son.'
No one said anything, so I ventured an objection. 'I'm sorry, Dr Freud, but why should it matter if one is a Christian or Jew?'
'My boy,' Freud responded gruffly, 'you put me in mind of one of those novels by James's brother; what is his name?'
'Henry, sir?'
'Yes, Henry.' If I imagined Freud was going to say more in answer to my question, I was mistaken. Instead he returned to Ferenczi and Brill. 'You would prefer psychoanalysis to be a Jewish national affair? Of course it is unjust of me to promote Jung, when others have been with me longer. But we Jews must be prepared to endure a certain amount of injustice if we want to make our way in the world. There is no other choice. Had my name been Jones, you can be sure my ideas, despite everything, would have met with far less resistance. Look at Darwin. He disproved Genesis, and he is acclaimed as a hero. Only a Gentile can bring psychoanalysis to the promised land. We must hold Jung to die Sache. All our hopes depend on him.'
The words Freud spoke in German meant the cause. I don't know why he didn't use English. For several minutes no one spoke. We engaged ourselves with the breakfast things. Brill, however, did not eat. He was biting his nails instead. I imagined that there would be no further discussion of Jung, but I was wrong again.
'And what about his disappearances?' asked Brill. 'Jelliffe told me that Jung left the Balmoral no later than midnight Sunday, but the clerk here swears Jung didn't return to the hotel until two. That's two hours unaccounted for after midnight. The next day, Jung claims he was in his room all afternoon napping, but the clerk says he was out until evening. You knocked at Jung's door Monday afternoon, Younger. I did too, long and hard. I don't think he was there at all. Where was he?'
I interrupted. 'I'm sorry. Did you just say Jung was at the Balmoral on Sunday night?'
'That's right,' Brill answered. 'Jelliffe's building. You were there last night.'
'Oh,' I said. 'I didn't realize.'
'Realize what?' asked Brill.
'Nothing,' I said. 'Just an odd coincidence.'
'What coincidence?'
'The other girl – the girl who was murdered – was killed at the Balmoral.' I shifted in my chair uncomfortably. 'On Sunday night. Between midnight and two.'
Brill and Ferenczi looked at each other.
'Gentlemen,' said Freud, 'don't be ridiculous.'
'And Nora was attacked on Monday evening,' Brill pointed out. 'Where?'
'Abraham,' said Freud.
'No one is accusing anyone,' Brill replied innocently, but with an overexcited expression. 'I'm just asking Younger where Nora's house is.'
'On Gramercy Park,' I answered.
'Gentlemen, I will hear no more of this,' Freud declared.
Another knock on the door; Jung himself entered. We exchanged greetings with him – stiffly, as might be expected. Jung, who did not seem to notice our discomfort, spooned sugar into his coffee and inquired whether we had enjoyed our dinner at Jelliffe's.
'Oh, Jung,' Brill broke in, 'you were spotted on Monday.'
'I beg your pardon?' Jung replied.
'You told us,' chided Brill, 'you spent Monday afternoon sleeping in your room. But it turns out you were spotted up and about the town.'
Freud, shaking his head, went to the window. He pushed it farther open.
'I never said I was in my room all Monday afternoon,' Jung answered evenly.
'Strange,' said Brill. 'I would have sworn you did. That reminds me, Jung, we are thinking of visiting Gramercy Park today. I don't suppose you'll join us?'
'I see,' said Jung.
'See what?' asked Brill.
'Why don't you just say it?' Jung retorted.
'I can't imagine what you're talking about,' was Brill's reply. He was deliberately making himself sound like a bad actor unsuccessfully feigning ignorance.
'So: I was observed at Gramercy Park,' replied Jung coldly. 'What are you going to do, report me to the police?' He turned to Freud. 'Well, as it seems your purpose in bringing me here was to interrogate me, you will forgive me if I don't breakfast with you.' He opened the door to let himself out and stared at Brill. 'I am ashamed of nothing.'
Due to the late General Sigel's prominence, the police had no difficulty locating his granddaughter Elsie's address. She lived with her parents on Wadsworth Avenue near 180th
Street. An officer from the Washington Heights station, dispatched to the house, escorted Mr and Mrs Sigel, together with their niece Mabel, to the Van den Heuvel building. There, in a waiting room outside the morgue, they met Detective Littlemore.
He learned from them that the nineteen-year-old Elsie had indeed gone missing almost a month ago, never returning from a trip to visit Grandmother Ellie in Brooklyn. In the first days after her disappearance, the Sigels had received a telegram from Elsie in Washington, D.C, indicating that she was there with a young man, evidently married to him. She begged her parents not to worry about her, assured them she was fine, and promised to be home by autumn. The parents had kept this wire, which they showed to the detective. The telegram had indeed been sent from a hotel in the capital, and Elsie's name was at the bottom, but there was of course no way to verify that she was the sender. Mr Sigel had not yet contacted the police, hoping to hear again from his daughter and anxious to avoid a scandal.
Littlemore showed the Sigels the letters from William Leon's trunk. They recognized the handwriting. The detective next showed them the silver pendant found on the dead girl and the hat with the bird on it. Neither Mr nor Mrs Sigel had ever seen these objects before – and indeed positively stated they did not belong to Elsie – but Mabel contradicted them. The pendant was hers; she had given it to Elsie in June.
Littlemore, drawing Mr Sigel aside, told the father he had better have a look at the body found in Leon's apartment. Downstairs in the morgue, Mr Sigel could not at first identify the corpse; it was too decayed. Somberly, he told the detective he would know the truth if he looked at the teeth; his daughter's left eye tooth pointed the wrong way. And so did that of the small decomposing body lying on the marble slab. 'It's her,' said Mr Sigel quietly.
When the two men returned to the waiting room, Mr Sigel cast a stony and accusing eye on his wife. The woman must have understood; she fell into convulsions. It took a long time to quiet her. Then her husband told the story.
Mrs Sigel did the Lord's work in Chinatown. For years she had toiled to convert the heathen Chinamen to Christianity. Last December, she had begun bringing Elsie with her to the mission house. Elsie had taken to the work with a passion that delighted her mother but disturbed her father. Despite Mr Sigel's strong disapproval, the girl was soon eagerly traveling on her own to Chinatown several times a week and teaching her own Sunday Bible classes. One of her most avid pupils, Mr Sigel recalled bitterly, had dared to call at their house a few months ago. Mr Sigel did not know his name. Littlemore showed him a photograph of William Leon; the father shut his eyes and nodded.
After the Sigels left the morgue, to endure as they might both their misery and their notoriety – newspapermen were already waiting outside – Detective Littlemore wondered where Mr Hugel was. Littlemore had assumed the coroner would have wanted to conduct the autopsy himself and to hear the Sigels' evidence. But the coroner was absent. Instead, one of his assistant physicians, Dr O'Hanlon, had examined the body. He informed Littlemore that Miss Sigel had been strangled to death, that she had been dead three to four weeks – and that Coroner Hugel was upstairs in his office, professing a complete lack of interest in the case.
The exquisite Clara Banwell, clad in a green dress matching her eyes, was undressing the equally exquisite, near desperate Nora Acton – quieting her, comforting her, reassuring her. Arriving at the house shortly after Littlemore's departure, Clara had gracefully ushered everyone out of Nora's bedroom, police and family alike. When Nora was naked, Clara drew her a cool bath and helped her step in. Nora, sobbing, begged Clara to let her speak: so many horrible things had happened.
Clara put two fingers to Nora's lips. 'Hush,' she said. 'Don't speak, darling. Close your eyes.'
Nora obeyed. Gently Clara bathed the girl, washed her hair, and dabbed her healing wounds with a smooth wet cloth.
'They don't believe me,' said Nora, holding back tears.
'I know. It's all right.' Clara tried to soothe the distraught girl. She asked Mrs Biggs, who was hovering anxiously in the hallway, to bring the ointment Dr Higginson left.
'Clara?'
'Yes.'
'Why didn't you come earlier?'
'Shh,' answered Clara, cooling Nora's brow. 'I'm here now.'
Later, after the bathwater drained away, Nora lay in the tub, her torso now draped with a white towel, her eyes closed. 'What are you doing to me, Clara?' she asked.
'Shaving you. We need to, to clean this awful burn. Besides, it will be prettier like this.' Clara placed Nora's hand protectively over the girl's most delicate spot. 'There,' she said. 'Press down, darling.' Clara placed her own strong hand atop Nora's, keeping a firm pressure and shifting position every now and then, so that she could do her work. 'Nora, George was with me all last night. The police asked me, and I had to tell them. You must tell them now. Otherwise they are going to take you away. They are already making arrangements with a sanatorium.'
'I shouldn't mind a sanatorium,' said Nora.
'Don't be silly. Wouldn't you rather come with me to the country? That is what we will do, darling. You and I, all by ourselves, just as we like. We can talk it all out there.' Clara finished her razor strokes. She applied to Nora's burn the soothing balm left by the doctor. 'But you must tell them.'
'What must I say?'
'Why, that you did all this to yourself. You were so angry at all of us: George, your mother and father, even me. You were trying to get back at us.'
'No, I could never be angry at you.'
'Oh, darling, nor I at you.' Clara turned her attention to the two lacerations on Nora's thighs. To these too she applied the doctor's ointment, moving her fingers in gentle circles. 'But you must tell them now. Tell them how sorry you are for everything. You will feel so much easier. And then you can come away with me for as long as you want.'
Even the coroner, a man of mercurial temperament, rarely passed from fury to exultation to despondency as quickly as he did when listening to Detective Littlemore's report of the events at the Acton house earlier that morning.
Littlemore had tried to interest the coroner in Elsie Sigel, but Hugel brushed the subject aside. The coroner had only heard about the hue and cry at the Actons' by accident, from one of the messenger boys. Hence his anger: why had they informed Littlemore but not himself? Then, hearing Nora's story, Hugel let out whoops of 'Ha!' and 'Now we have him!' and 'I told you, didn't I?' Finally, learning of the discovery of the lipstick, cigarettes, and whip secreted in the girl's bedroom, he slumped back into his chair.
'It's over,' said Hugel quietly. His face began to darken. 'The girl must be put away.'
'No, wait, Mr Hugel. Listen to this.' Littlemore told the coroner about the discovery of the tiepin.
Hugel barely registered the news. 'Too little, too late,' he said bitterly. He grunted in disgust. 'I believed everything she said. The girl must be put away, do you hear me?'
'You think she's crazy.'
The coroner took a deep breath. 'I congratulate you, Detective, on your razor-sharp logic. The Riverford-Acton case is now closed. Inform the mayor. I am not speaking to him.'
The detective blinked uncomprehendingly. 'You can't close the case, Mr Hugel.'
'There is no case,' said the coroner. 'I cannot prosecute a murder without a corpus delicti. Do you understand? No murder without a body. And I cannot prosecute an assault without an assault. Shall we indict Miss Acton for criminal assault on her own person?'
'Wait, Mr Hugel, I didn't even tell you. Remember the black-haired man? I found out where he went. First he goes to the Hotel Manhattan – how about that? – and then he goes to a cathouse on Fortieth Street. So I go to this cathouse myself, and the lady inside tips me off to Harry Thaw, who -'
'What are you talking about, Littlemore?'
'Harry Thaw, the guy who murdered Stanford White.'
'I know who Harry Thaw is,' said the coroner, with considerable self-restraint.
'You're not going to believe this, Mr Hugel, but if the Chinaman's not the killer, I think Harry Thaw might be our guy.'
'Harry Thaw.'
'He got off, remember? Beat the rap,' said Littlemore. 'Well, at his trial, there was this affidavit from his wife, and -'
'Are you going to bring Harry Houdini into it as well?'
'Houdini? Houdini s the escape artist, Mr Hugel.'
'I know who Houdini is,' said the coroner, very quietly.
'Why would I bring him into it?' asked Littlemore.
'Because Harry Thaw is in a locked cell, Detective. He did not beat the rap. He is incarcerated at the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.'
'He is? I thought he got out. But then – then he can't be the guy.'
'No.'
'I don't get it. This lady at the house where the black- haired man went -'
'Forget the black-haired man!' the coroner exploded. 'No one listens to me in any event. I write a report; no one reads it. I decide on an arrest; my decision is ignored. I am closing the case.'
'But the threads,' Littlemore answered. 'The hairs. The injuries. You said so, Mr Hugel, you said so yourself.'
'What did I say?'
'You said the same guy who killed Miss Riverford attacked Nora Acton. You said there was proof. That means Miss Acton didn't cook it all up. There was an assault, Mr Hugel. There is a case. Somebody attacked Miss Acton on Monday.'
'What I said, Detective, was that the physical evidence was consistent with the assailant being the same person in both cases, not that it was proof. Read my report.'
'You don't think Miss Acton – you don't think she whipped herself, do you?'
The coroner stared straight ahead with his morose, sleepless eyes. 'Disgusting,' he said.
'But how about the tiepin? You said there was a tiepin with Banwell's initials on it. It's exactly what you were looking for, Mr Hugel.'
'Littlemore, don't you have ears? You heard Riviere. The impression on Elizabeth Riverford's neck was not GB. I made a mistake,' Hugel muttered angrily. 'I made one mistake after another.'
'So what's it doing there – the pin, in the tree?'
'How should I know?' yelled Hugel. 'Why don't you ask her? We have nothing. Nothing. Only that infernal girl. No jury in the country would believe her now. She probably put the pin in the tree herself. She is – she is psychopathic. They must put her away.'
Sandor Ferenczi, smiling and nodding encouragingly, backed himself toward the door of Jung's hotel room like a courtier withdrawing from the royal presence. He had, with some trepidation, conveyed Freud's request to see Jung alone.
'Say that I will call on him in ten minutes,' Jung had answered. 'With pleasure.'
Ferenczi had expected an implacable Swiss in high umbrage, not the serene Jung who had greeted him. Ferenczi would have to inform Freud that Jung's change of temperament struck him as peculiar. More than that, he would have to tell Freud what Jung was doing.
Hundreds of pebbles and small stones, together with an armful of broken twigs and torn-up grass, were strewn about the floor of Jung's room. Ferenczi could not imagine where it had all come from: possibly from empty lots undergoing construction, which seemed ubiquitous in New York. Jung himself was sitting cross-legged on the floor, playing with these materials. He had pushed all the hotel furniture – armchairs, lamps, coffee table – out of the way, clearing a large empty space on the floor. In this space, he had built a village of stones, with dozens of tiny houses surrounding a castle. Each house had its own little plot of tufted grass behind it: perhaps a vegetable garden or backyard. In the center of the castle, Jung was trying to implant a forked twig with long blades of grass tied to it, but he could not make this standard stay upright. That was why, Ferenczi guessed, Jung needed another ten minutes before he could come. Assuming, Ferenczi added to himself, that the delay had nothing to do with the service revolver lying on Jung's bedside table.
It is surely impossible for a house to wear an expression, but I would have sworn otherwise as I neared the Actons' limestone townhouse on Gramercy Park late Thursday morning. Before anyone answered the door, I knew something was amiss within.
Mrs Biggs let me in. The woman was literally wringing her hands. In an anguished whisper, she told me it was all her fault. She was just tidying up, she said. She would never have shown it to anyone if she had known.
Gradually Mrs Biggs calmed down, and I learned from her all the dreadful events of the previous night, including the discovery of the telltale cigarette. At least, Mrs Biggs added with relief, Mrs Banwell was now upstairs. It was plain that the old servant regarded Clara Banwell as capable of taking matters in hand more competently than the girl's own mother or father. Mrs Biggs left me in the sitting room. Fifteen minutes later, Clara Banwell entered.
Mrs Banwell was dressed to leave. She wore a simple hat with a diaphanous veil and carried a closed parasol that must have been quite expensive, judging by its iridescent handle. 'Forgive me, Dr Younger,' she said. 'I don't want to delay your seeing Nora. But could I have a word with you before I go?'
As she removed her hat and veil, I could not help noticing the length and thickness of her eyelashes, behind which sparkled her knowing eyes. She was not one of Mrs Wharton's dryads 'subdued to the conventions of the drawing-room.' Rather, the conventions lit her up. It was as if all our fashions had been chosen to show off her body, her ivory skin, her green eyes. I could make nothing of her expression; she managed to look both proud and vulnerable.
'Certainly, Mrs Banwell.'
'I know now what Nora has told you,' she said. 'About me. I didn't know last night.'
'I'm sorry,' I replied. 'It is the unenviable hazard of being a doctor.'
'Do you assume your patients tell the truth?'
I said nothing.
'Well, in this case it is true,' she said. 'Nora saw me with her father, just as she described it to you. But since you know that much, I want you to know the rest. I did not act without my husband's knowledge.'
'I assure you, Mrs Banwell -'
'Please don't. You think I am trying to justify myself.' She picked up a photograph from the mantel: it was of Nora at thirteen or fourteen. 'I am far past self-justification, Doctor. What I wish to tell you is for Nora's sake, not my own. I remember when they moved back into this house. George rebuilt it for them. She was shockingly attractive, even then. And only fourteen. One felt the goddesses had for once put aside their differences and made her together as a present for Zeus. I am childless, Doctor.'
'I see.'
'Do you? I am childless because my husband will not allow me to bear. He says it would spoil my figure. We have never had – ordinary – sexual congress, my husband and I. Not once. He will not allow it.'
'Perhaps he is impotent.'
'George?' She looked amused at the thought.
'It is hard to believe a man would voluntarily restrain himself under the circumstances.'
'I believe you are complimenting me, Doctor. Well, George does not restrain himself. He causes me to gratify him in – a different fashion. For ordinary congress, he has recourse to other women. My husband wants many of the young women he meets, and he gets. them. He wanted Nora. As it happened, Nora's father wanted me. George saw a way, therefore, to obtain what he wanted. He obliged me to seduce Harcourt Acton. Of course I was not permitted to do with Harcourt what was forbidden with my own husband. Hence what Nora saw.'
'Your husband believed he could make Acton prostitute his own daughter?'
'Harcourt was not required actually to hand Nora over, Doctor. All my husband needed was for Harcourt to feel that his own happiness was so dependent on me that he would be averse, deeply averse, to any rift coming between his family and ours. That way, when the time came, he would turn a blind eye and a deaf ear.'
I understood. After Mrs Banwell entered into relations with Mr Acton, George Banwell made his first advance on Nora. His strategy evidently worked. When Nora protested to her father and begged him to send Banwell away, Mr Acton chose to disbelieve and scold her – just as if, Nora had told me, she had done something wrong. And she had: she had threatened his precious arrangement with Mrs Banwell.
'You must think what it is like,' Mrs Banwell added, 'for a man such as Harcourt Acton to be offered what he has only dreamed of – indeed, what he never had the courage even to dream of. I truly believe the man would have done anything I asked.'
I felt a peculiar pressure just below my sternum. 'Did your husband get what he wanted?'
'Are you asking for professional reasons, Doctor?'
'Of course.'
'Of course. The answer, I believe, is no. Not yet, at any rate.' She returned the photograph of Nora to its place on the mantel, beside a picture of the girl's parents. 'In any event, Doctor, Nora is aware that I am – unhappy – in my marriage. I believe she is now trying to rescue me.'
'How?'
'Nora has a very fertile imagination. You must remember: even though to your man's eyes, Nora looks like a woman, a prize ready to be possessed, she is still just a child. A child whose parents have never had the slightest understanding of her. An only child. Nora has lived almost all her life in a world of her own.'
'You said she was trying to rescue you. How?'
'She may believe she can bring George down by telling the police he attacked her. She may even believe he did. Possibly we have overwhelmed the poor thing, and she is suffering from a delusion.'
'Or possibly your husband did attack her.'
'I don't say he is incapable of it. Far from it. My husband is capable of nearly anything. But in this case, it happens he didn't. George came home last night just after I returned from the party. It was eleven-thirty. Nora says she did not go to her room until quarter to twelve.'
'Your husband might have left home in the night, Mrs Banwell.'
'Yes, I know, he might well have on another night, but last night he didn't. He was too busy, you see, having his way with me. All night long.' She smiled, a very small, ironic, perfect smile, and rubbed one of her wrists unconsciously. Her long sleeves concealed her wrists, but she saw me looking. She took a deep breath. 'You might as well see.'
She came very near me, so near I became aware of the diamonds glinting in her earlobes and the fragrant smell of her hair. She pushed up her sleeves a little and revealed a painful rawness, of fresh origin, on both wrists. I have heard there are men who bind women for pleasure. I cannot be sure this was the meaning of the bruised skin Mrs Banwell showed me, but certainly it was the picture that came to mind.
She laughed lightly. The sound was wry, not bitter. 'I am a fallen woman, Doctor, and at the same time a virgin. Have you ever heard of such a thing?'
'Mrs Banwell, I am not a lawyer, but I believe you have more than ample grounds for divorce. Indeed, you may not be legally married at all, since there was never consummation.'
'Divorce? You don't know George. He would sooner kill me than let me go.' She smiled again. I could not help imagining what it would feel like to kiss her. 'And who would have me, Doctor, even if I could get away? What man would touch me, knowing what I have done?'
'Any man,' I said.
'You are kind, but you are lying.' She looked up at me. 'You are lying cruelly. You could be touching me right now. But you never would.'
I gazed down at her flawless, irredeemably charming features. 'No, Mrs Banwell, I never would. But not for the reasons you say.'
At that moment, Nora Acton appeared at the door.
Detective Littlemore's stride, after his interview with the coroner, lacked its customary snappiness. The news that Harry Thaw was still locked up in an asylum had come as a blow to him. Ever since he read the Thaw transcript, Littlemore had imagined that this case might be bigger than anybody realized and he might be on the verge of breaking it open. Now he didn't know if there was a case at all.
The detective had formed a high opinion of Mr Hugel, despite all his outbursts and idiosyncracies. Littlemore felt sure Hugel could solve the case. The police weren't supposed to just give up. The coroner in particular wasn't supposed to. He was too smart.
Littlemore believed in the police force. He had been on it for eight years, ever since he lied about his age in order to become a junior beat patrolman. It was the first real job he ever had, and he stuck to it. He loved living in the police barracks when he first joined up. He loved eating with the other cops, listening to their stories. He knew there were some rotten apples, but he thought they were the exceptions. If you told him, for example, that his hero Sergeant Becker shook down every brothel and casino in the Tenderloin for protection money, Littlemore would have thought you were pulling his leg. If you told him the new police commissioner wanted in on the game, he would have said you were crazy. In short, the detective looked up to his superiors on the force, and Hugel had let him down.
But Littlemore never turned against someone who disappointed him. His reaction was the opposite. He wanted to bring the coroner back on board. He needed to find something that would convince the coroner the case was still alive. Hugel had been certain that Banwell was the perpetrator from the start; maybe he was right all along.
To be sure, Littlemore believed in Mayor McClellan even more than he believed in Coroner Hugel, and the mayor had provided Banwell with a firm alibi on the night Miss Riverford was killed. But maybe Banwell had an accomplice – maybe a Chinese accomplice. Hadn't Banwell himself hired Chong Sing to work in the laundry of the Balmoral? And now it turned out that Miss Riverford's murderer might not have been Miss Acton's assailant: that's what Mr Hugel had just told him. So maybe Banwell's accomplice killed Miss Riverford, and Banwell attacked Miss Acton. It occurred to Littlemore that, based on this theory, Hugel would still have made a mistake. But the detective, while holding an elevated view of the coroner's powers, didn't regard him as infallible. And Hugel, Littlemore figured, wouldn't mind being wrong on a detail if he was right on the whole shebang.
So the detective, regaining the spring in his step, knew he had work to do. First, he went up the street to headquarters and found Louis Riviere in his basement darkroom. Littlemore asked Riviere if he could make a reverse image of the photograph that showed the mark on Elizabeth Riverford's neck. The Frenchman told him to come back at the end of the day to pick it up. 'And can you enlarge it for me too, Louie?' Littlemore asked.
'Why not?' replied Riviere. 'The sun is good.'
Next the detective headed uptown. He rode the train to Forty-second Street and from there strolled over to Susie Merrill's house. No one answered, so he took up a position down the block and across the street. An hour later, the hefty Susie let herself out, wearing another of her enormous hats, this one boasting a fruit medley. Littlemore followed her to a Child's Lunch Room on Broadway. She sat down at a booth alone. Littlemore waited until she was served to see if anyone else was going to show up. As Mrs Merrill was attacking her plate of corned beef hash, Littlemore slipped into the seat across from her.
'Hello, Susie,' he said. 'I found it – what you wanted me to find.'
'What are you doing here? Get out. I told you to keep me out of it.'
'No, you didn't.'
'Well, I'm telling you now,' said Susie. 'You want to get us both killed?'
'By who, Susie? Thaw's in a loony bin upstate.'
'Oh, yeah?'
'Yeah.'
'I guess he can't be your murderer then,' she observed.
'I guess not.'
'So there's nothing to talk about, is there?'
'Don't hold out on me, Susie.'
'You want to get yourself killed, that's fine with me, but leave me out of it.' Mrs Merrill rose, putting thirty cents on the table: a nickel for her coffee, twenty cents for her hash and poached egg, another nickel for the waitress. 'I've got a baby in the house,' she said.
Littlemore grabbed her arm. 'Think it over, Susie, I want answers, and I'll be coming back for them.'
Clara Banwell didn't show any of the discomfort I felt under Nora's frozen gaze. Filling the air with an easy flow of words, she said her good-byes, acting for all the world as if she and I had not been caught standing several inches too close together. She extended her hand to me, kissed Nora on the cheek, and thoughtfully added that we need not see her to the door; she didn't want to delay Nora's treatment a moment longer. Seconds later, I heard the front door close behind her.
Nora stood in the same spot Mrs Banwell had occupied minutes before. I had no business noticing her looks, given the harrowing events of the night before, but I couldn't help myself. It was absurd. One could walk for miles in New York City – as I had that morning – or spend a month at the Grand Central Station, and never see a single woman of surpassing physical grace. Yet in the space of five minutes, two had stood before me in the Actons' sitting room. But what a contrast between them.
Nora wore no adornments, no jewelry, no embroidered fabric. She carried no parasol; she had no veil. She wore a simple white blouse, its sleeves ending at the elbow, tucked at her impossibly narrow waist into a sky-blue pleated skirt. The top of her shirt was gently scooped, revealing the delicate structure of her collarbone and her long, lovely neck. This neck was now almost unblemished, the bruises faded. Her blond hair was pulled back as always into a braid reaching almost to her waist. She was only, as Mrs Banwell had said, a girl. Her youth cried out from every plane and curve of her, especially in the high color of her cheeks and eyes, which radiated with youth's hope, its freshness, and, I should add, its fury.
'I hate you more than anyone else I have ever known,' she said to me.
So: I was now, more than ever, hoisted into the position of her father. As if led by some inexorable fate, she had come upon me and Clara Banwell closeted in a study just as she had come upon her father and Clara Banwell consorting in another study three years ago. The signal difference – that there was nothing between Mrs Banwell and myself – was evidently lost on her. That was unsurprising. It was not I she was staring angrily at now. It was her father, dressed in my clothes. Had I been seeking to cement the analytic transference, I could not have devised a better stratagem. Had I been hoping to bring her analysis to a climax, I could not have asked for a luckier conspiracy of events. I now had the opportunity – and the duty – to try to show Nora the erroneous transposition occurring in her mind, so that she could recognize how the rage she imagined she felt toward me was actually the misdirected anger she harbored for her father.
In other words, I was obliged to bury my own emotion. I had to conceal the least shred of feeling I had for her, no matter how genuine, no matter how overpowering. 'Then I am at a disadvantage, Miss Acton,' I replied, 'because I love you more than anyone else I have ever known.'
A perfect silence enveloped us for several heartbeats.
'You do?' she asked.
'Yes.'
'But you and Clara were -'
'We weren't. I swear it.'
'You weren't?' •No."
Nora began to breathe hard. Too hard: her outer clothes were not tight, but she seemed to be wearing something underneath that was. Her respiration was entirely concentrated in the upper part of her torso. Concerned she might faint, I guided her to the front door and opened it. She needed air. Across the street was the dappled grove of Gramercy Park. Nora stepped outside. I suggested that her parents ought to know if she was going out.
'Why?' she asked me. 'We could just go to the park.'
We crossed the street and, at one of the wrought-iron gates, Nora produced from her purse a gold and black key. There was an awkward moment when I helped her through the gate: a decision had to be made about whether I would offer her my arm as we walked. I managed not to.
Therapeutically speaking, I was in a great deal of trouble. I did not fear for myself, although it was remarkable that my feelings for this girl seemed impervious to the fact that she might well be unstable or even mentally ill. If Nora had actually burned herself, there were two possibilities. Either she did it with full conscious deliberation and was lying to the world, or she did it in a dissociated state, hypnoid or somnambulistic, which was shut off from the rest of her consciousness. On the whole, I think I preferred the former alternative, but neither one was attractive.
I did not regret having confessed my feelings to her. The circumstances forced my hand. But while declaring my love for her might have been honorable, acting on it would be the opposite. The lowest-bred cur would not take advantage of a girl in her condition. I had to find a way to let her know this. I had to extricate myself from the role of lover into which I had just stumbled and try to become her physician again.
'Miss Acton,' I said.
'Won't you call me Nora, Doctor?'
'No.'
'Why?'
'Because I am still your doctor. You can't be Nora to me. You are my patient.' I wasn't sure how she would take that, but I went on. 'Tell me what happened last night. No, wait: you said in the hotel yesterday that your memory of Monday's attack had come back to you. Tell me first what you remember about that.'
'Must I?'
'Yes.'
She asked if we could sit, and we found a bench in a secluded corner. She still did not know, she said, how it all began or how she got there. That part of her memory remained missing. What she remembered was being tied up in the dark in her parents' bedroom. She was standing, bound by the wrists to something overhead. She was wearing only her slip. All the curtains and blinds were drawn.
The man was behind her. He had tied a soft piece of fabric – perhaps silk – around her throat and was pulling it so tight she couldn't breathe, much less call out. He was also hitting her with a strap or crop of some kind. It stung but it was not unbearable – more like a spanking. It was the silk around her throat that scared her; she thought he meant to kill her. But every time she was on the verge of passing out, he would relax the stranglehold ever so slightly, just enough to let her catch her breath.
He began to strike her much harder. It became so painful she thought she couldn't stand it. Then he dropped the whip, stepped behind her, so close she could feel his harsh breath on her shoulders, and put a hand on her. She didn't say where; I didn't ask. At the same time, a part of his body – 'a hard part,' she said – came into contact with her hip. The man made an ugly sound, and then he made a mistake; the tie around her throat suddenly went slack. She took a deep breath and screamed – screamed as hard and as long as she could. She must have passed out. The next thing she knew, Mrs Biggs was by her side.
Nora maintained her composure while recounting all this, her hands folded in her lap. Without changing attitude, she asked, 'Are you disgusted by me?'
'No,' I said. 'In your memory of the attack, was the man Banwell?'
'I thought so. But the mayor said -'
'The mayor said Banwell was with him Sunday night, when the other girl was murdered. If you remember Banwell being your attacker, you must say so.'
'I don't know,' said Nora plaintively. 'I think so. I don't know. He was behind me the whole time.'
'Tell me about last night,' I said.
She poured out the story of the intruder in her bedroom. This time, she said, she was certain it was Banwell. Toward the end, however, she turned away from me once more. Was there something she wasn't saying? 'I don't even own any lipstick,' she concluded earnestly. 'And that horrible thing they found in my closet. Where am I supposed to have gotten that?'
I made the obvious point: 'You are wearing makeup now.' There was the lightest hint of gloss on her lips, and the faintest blush on her cheeks.
'But this is Clara's!' she cried. 'She put it on me. She said it would suit me.'
We sat in silence for a time.
At last, she spoke. 'You don't believe a word I've said.'
'I don't believe you would lie to me.'
'But I would,' she answered. 'I have.'
'When?'
'When I said I hated you,' she replied, after a long pause.
'Tell me what you're keeping back.'
'What do you mean?' she asked.
'There is something else about last night – something that makes you doubt yourself.'
'How do you know?' she demanded.
'Just tell me.'
Reluctantly, she confessed that there was one inexplicable piece of the episode. Her vantage point, as she saw the awful event unfold, was not from her own eye level but from a place above both herself and the intruder. She actually saw herself lying on the bed as if she were an observer of the scene, not the victim. 'How is that possible, Doctor?' she cried softly. 'It's not possible, is it?'
I wanted to console her, but what I had to say was not likely to be comforting. 'What you are describing is how we see things sometimes in dreams.'
'But if I dreamt it, how did I get burned?' she whispered. 'I didn't burn myself, did I? Did I?'
I could not answer. I was picturing an even worse scenario. Could she also have inflicted those terrible wounds – the first set of wounds – on herself? I tried to imagine her drawing a knife or razor along her own soft skin, making it bleed. It was impossible for me to believe.
From far downtown, a roar of human voices suddenly erupted in a great distant cheer. Nora asked what it could be. I said it was probably the strikers. A march had been promised by union leaders in the aftermath of some labor trouble downtown yesterday. A notorious firebrand called Gompers vowed a strike that would bring the city's industry to a halt.
'They have every right to strike,' said Nora, clearly eager to be distracted. 'The capitalists should be ashamed of themselves, employing those people without paying them enough to feed their families. Have you seen the homes in which they live?'
She described to me how, all last spring, Clara Banwell and she had visited families in the tenements of the Lower East Side. It had been Clara's idea. That was how, said Nora, she had met Elsie Sigel with the Chinaman whom Detective Littlemore had been asking about.
'Elsie Sigel?' I repeated. Aunt Mamie had mentioned Miss Sigel to me at her gala. 'Who has run off to Washington?'
'Yes,' said Nora. 'I thought her very foolish to be doing missionary work when people are dying for want of food and shelter. And Elsie was working only with men, when it is the women and children who are really suffering.' Clara, Nora explained to me, had made a special point of calling on those families where the men had run off or been killed in work accidents. Clara and Nora got to know many such families on their visits, spending hours in their homes. Nora would care for the little ones while Clara befriended the women and the more grown-up children. They started visiting these families once a week, bringing them food and necessaries. Twice they had taken babies to the hospital, saving them from serious disease or even death. Once, Nora told me more darkly, a girl had gone missing; Clara and she visited every police station and hospital downtown, finally finding the girl in the morgue. The medical examiner said the girl had been raped. The girl's mother had no one to comfort or support her; Clara did both. Nora had seen unthinkable squalor that summer, but also – or so I guessed – a warmth of familial love previously unknown to her.
When she concluded, Nora and I sat looking at each other. Without warning, she said, 'Would you kiss me if I asked you?'
'Don't ask me, Miss Acton,' I said.
She took my hand and drew it toward her, touching the back of my fingers to her cheek.
'No,' I said sharply. She let go at once. Everything was my fault. I had given her every reason to believe she could take the liberty she had just taken. Now I had pulled the rug out from under her. 'You must believe me,' I told her. 'There is nothing I would like more. But I can't. I would be taking advantage of you.'
'I want you to take advantage of me,' she said.
'No.'
'Because I am seventeen?'
'Because you are my patient. Listen to me. The feelings you may think you have for me – you must not believe in them. They aren't real. They are an artifact of your analysis. It happens to every single patient who is psychoanalyzed.'
She looked at me as if I must be joking. 'You think your stupid questions have made me favor you?'
'Think of it. One moment you feel indifference toward me. Then rage. Then jealousy. Then – something else. But it's not me. It's nothing I have done. It's nothing I am. How could it be? You don't know me. You don't know the first thing about me. All these feelings come from elsewhere in your life. They surface because of these stupid questions I ask you. But they belong elsewhere. They are feelings you have for someone else, not me.'
'You think I am in love with someone else? Who? Not George Banwell?'
'You might have been.'
'Never.' She made a genuinely disgusted face. 'I detest him.'
I took the plunge. I hated taking it – because I expected she would henceforth regard me with revulsion – and my timing was all wrong, but it was still my obligation. 'Dr Freud has a theory, Miss Acton. It may apply to you.'
'What theory?' She was growing increasingly vexed.
'I warn you, it is distasteful in the extreme. He believes that all of us, from a very early age, harbor – that we secretly wish – well, in your case, he believes that when you saw Mrs Banwell with your father, when you saw her kneeling before your father and – a – engaging with him in -'
'You don't have to say it,' she broke in.
'He believes you felt jealous.'
She stared at me blankly.
I was having trouble making myself clear. 'Directly, physically jealous. What I mean is, Dr Freud believes that when you saw what Mrs Banwell was doing to your father, you wished you were the one who – that you had fantasies of being the one who -'
'Stop!' she cried out. She put her hands over her ears.
'I'm sorry.'
'How can he know that?' She was aghast. Her hands now covered her mouth.
I registered this reaction. I heard her words. But I tried to believe I hadn't. I wanted to say, I must be hearing things; I actually thought for a moment you asked how Freud knew.
'I never told anyone that,' she whispered, turning scarlet all over. 'Not anyone. How could he possibly know?'
I could only stare at her blankly, as she had stared at me a moment before.
'Oh, I am vile! ' she cried. She ran away, back toward her house.
After leaving Child's, Littlemore hoofed it over to the Forty-seventh Street police station, to see if either Chong Sing or William Leon had been collared. Both men had indeed been arrested – a hundred times, Captain Post told the detective irritably. Within hours of the perpetrators' descriptions going out, dozens of calls had come in, from all over the city and even from Jersey, from people claiming to have spotted Chong. With Leon it was even worse. Every Chinaman in a suit and tie was William Leon.
'Jack Reardon's been running around town all day like his head was chopped off,' said Captain Post, referring to the officer who, having been present with Littlemore when Miss Sigel's body was discovered, was the only man Post had who had actually seen the elusive Chong Sing. Reardon had been dispatched to police stations all over town, wherever another 'Mr Chong' had been picked up, and everywhere he went, Reardon discovered another false arrest. 'It's no good. We locked up half of Chinatown, and we still didn't get 'em. I had to tell the boys to lay off any more arrests. Here. You want to run any of these down?'
Post threw Littlemore a record of reported but not yet acted-upon Chong Sing and William Leon sightings. The detective perused the list, running his finger down the handwritten notes. He stopped halfway down the page, where a one-line description caught his eye. It read: Canal at River. Chinaman seen working docks. Said to meet description of suspect Chong Sing.
'Got a car?' asked Littlemore. 'I want to have a look at this one.'
'Why?'
'Because there's red clay at those docks,' answered the detective.
Littlemore drove Captain Post's one and only police car downtown, accompanied by a uniformed man. They turned on Canal Street and followed it all the way to the eastern edge of the city, where the immense, newly erected Manhattan Bridge rose up over the East River. Littlemore stopped at the entry to the construction site and cast his eyes over the laborers.
'There he is,' said the detective, pointing. 'That's him.'
It would have been hard to miss Chong Sing: a lone, conspicuous Chinese among a throng of white and black workingmen. He was wheeling a barrow filled with cinder blocks.
'Walk right at him,' Littlemore instructed the officer. 'If he runs, I'll take him.'
Chong Sing didn't run. At the sight of a police officer, he merely put his head down and kept pushing his wheelbarrow. When the officer put the arm on him, Chong submitted without a fight. Other workmen stopped and watched the uneventful arrest unfold, but no one interfered. By the time the officer returned to the police car where Detective Littlemore was waiting, the men were back at work as if nothing had happened.
'Why'd you run away yesterday, Mr Chong?'
'I no run,' said Chong. 'I go to work. See? I go to work.'
'I'm going to have to charge you as an accessory to murder. You understand what that means? You could hang.' Littlemore made a gesture conveying the meaning of the last word he had spoken.
'I don't know anything,' the Chinese man pleaded. 'Leon go away. Then smell come from Leon room. That's all.'
'Sure,' said the detective. Littlemore had the officer take Chong Sing to the Tombs. The detective stayed behind. He wanted a closer look at the docks. The puzzle pieces were reconfiguring themselves in the detective's mind – and beginning to fit together. Littlemore knew he was going to find clay at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge, and he had a hunch that George Banwell might have stepped in that clay.
Everyone knew Banwell was building the Manhattan Bridge towers. When Mayor McClellan awarded the contract to Banwell's American Steel Company, the Hearst papers had cried corruption, condemning the mayor for favoring an old friend and gleefully predicting delays, breakdowns, and overcharges. In fact, Banwell got those towers up not only within budget but in record time. He had personally supervised the construction – which gave Littlemore his idea.
Littlemore walked toward the river, blending into the mass of men. He could mix with pretty much anyone, if he wanted. Littlemore was good at seeming easy because he was easy, especially when things were falling into place. Chong Sing had two jobs working for Mr George Banwell. Wasn't that interesting?
The detective arrived at the crowded central pier just in time for a change of shifts. Hundreds of dirty, booted men were trudging off the pier, while a long line of others waited to take the elevator down to the caisson. The din of the turbines, a constant mechanical throbbing, filled the air with a furious rhythm.
If you had asked Littlemore how he knew there was some trouble, some unhappiness, in the air as well, he could not have told you. Engaging a few of the men in conversation, he quickly learned of Seamus Malley's bad end. Poor Malley was, the men said, yet another victim of caisson disease. When they opened the elevator door a couple of mornings ago, they found him lying dead, dried blood trailing from his ears and mouth.
The men complained bitterly of the caisson, which they called 'the box' or 'the coffin.' Some thought it cursed. Almost all had ailments they ascribed to it. Most said they were glad their work was almost finished, but the older heads clucked and replied that they'd all be missing their sandhog days soon enough – sandhog being the word for a caisson worker – when their pay stopped coming in. What pay? one of the boys replied. Was three dollars for twelve hours of work supposed to be called pay? 'Look at Malley,' this one said. 'He couldn't even afford a roof over his head with our "pay." That's why he's dead. They killed him. They're killing all of us.' But another replied that Malley had a roof, all right; he just also had a wife – that was why he was spending nights down in the box.
Littlemore, observing tracks of red clay all over the pier, knelt to tie his shoes and surreptitiously collected samples. He inquired if Mr Banwell ever came down to the pier. The answer was yes. In fact, he was told, Mr Banwell took at least one trip down to the coffin every day to inspect the work. Sometimes even His Honor, the mayor himself, would go with him.
The detective asked what Banwell was like to work for. Hell, was the answer. The men agreed that Banwell didn't care how many of them died in the caisson, if the job got done faster that way. Yesterday was the first time they could remember when Banwell had ever shown any concern for their lives.
'How's that?' asked Littlemore.
'He told us to forget about Window Five.'
The 'windows,' the men told Littlemore, were the caisson's debris chutes. Each one had a number, and Window Five had jammed up earlier this week. Normally the boss – Banwell – would have immediately ordered them to clear the blockage, a job the sandhogs hated, because it required a difficult, dangerous maneuver with at least one man inside the window when it was inundated with water. But yesterday, for the first time, Banwell told them not to bother. One man suggested the boss might be getting soft. The others denied it; they said Banwell didn't see any point taking chances with the bridge so near completion.
Littlemore chewed this information over. Then he went to the elevator.
The elevator man – a wrinkly codger with not a hair on his head – was perched on a wooden stool inside the car. The detective asked him who locked the elevator door two nights ago, the night Malley died.
'I did,' said the old man, with a proprietary air.
'Was the car up here at the pier when you locked up that night, or was it down below?'
'Up here, o'course. You ain't too quick, are you, young fella? How can my elevator be down there if I'm up here?'
The question was a good one. The elevator was manually operated. Only a man inside the car could take her up or bring her down. Hence when the elevator man completed his last run of the night, the car was necessarily up at the pier. But if the elevator man had asked Littlemore a good question, the detective replied with a better one. 'So how did he get up here?'
'What?'
'The dead guy,' said Littlemore. 'Malley. He stayed below Tuesday night, when everybody else came up?'
'That's right.' The old man shook his head. 'Blamed fool. Not the first time, neither. I told him he oughtn'ta. I told him.'
'And they found him right here in your car, at the pier, the next morning?'
'That's right. Dead as a dead fish. You can still see his blood. I been trying to clean it off two whole days now, and I can't. Washed it with soap, washed it with soda. See it?'
'So how did he get up here?' asked the detective again.
Carl Jung stood straight and tall in the doorway to Freud's suite. He was fully, formally dressed. Nothing in his demeanor suggested a man who had just been playing with sticks and stones on the floor of his hotel room.
Freud, in vest and shirtsleeves, begged his guest to make himself comfortable. His instinct told him this interview was decisive. Jung decidedly did not look right. Freud gave no credence to Brill's accusations, but he began to agree that Jung might be spinning out of his – Freud's – orbit.
Jung was, Freud knew, more intelligent and creative than any of his other followers – the first one with the potential to break new ground. But Jung undoubtedly had a father complex. When, in one of his earliest letters, Jung begged Freud for a photograph of himself, saying he would 'cherish' it, Freud was flattered. But when he explicitly asked Freud to regard him not as an equal but as a son, Freud became concerned. He told himself then he would have to take special care.
It occurred to Freud that, as far as he knew, Jung did
not have any other male friends. Rather, Jung surrounded himself with women, many women – too many. That was the other difficulty. Given Hall's communication, Freud no longer could avoid a conversation with Jung about the girl who had written claiming to be Jung's patient and mistress. Freud had seen the unconscionable letter Jung sent to the girl's mother. On top of all this, there was Ferenczi's report on the state of Jung's hotel room.
The one point on which Freud had no qualms was Jung's belief in the fundamental tenets of psychoanalysis. In their private letters and in hours of private talk, Freud had tested, prodded, probed. There could be no doubt: Jung fully believed in. the sexual aetiology. And he had come to his conviction in the best of all possible ways, overcoming his own skepticism after seeing Freud's hypotheses confirmed again and again in clinical practice.
'We have always spoken freely to each other,' said Freud. 'Can we now?'
'I should like nothing more,' said Jung. 'Especially now that I have freed myself from your paternal authority.'
Freud tried not to appear taken aback. 'Good, good. Coffee?'
'No, thank you. Yes. It happened yesterday, when you chose to keep hidden the truth of your Count Thun dream in order to preserve your authority. You see the paradox. You feared losing your authority; as a result, you lost it. You cared more for authority than truth; with me, there can be no authority other than truth. But it is better this way. Your cause will only prosper from my independence.
Indeed, it already is prospering. I have solved the problem of incest!'
Out of this rush of words, Freud fastened on two. 'My cause?'
'What?'
'You said, "your cause",' Freud repeated.
'I did not.'
'You did. It is the second time.'
'Well, it is yours – is it not? – yours and mine. It will be infinitely stronger now. Didn't you hear me? I have solved the incest problem.'
'What do you mean, "solved" it?' said Freud. 'What problem?'
'We know the grown son does not actually covet his mother sexually, with her varicose veins and sagging breasts. That is obvious to anyone. Nor does the infant son, who has no inkling of penetration. Why then does the adult's neurosis revolve so frequently around the Oedipal complex, as your cases and my own confirm? The answer came to me in a dream last night. The adult conflict reactivates the infantile material. The neurotic's suppressed libido is forced back into its infantile channels – just as you have always said! – where it finds the mother, who was once of such special value to him. The libido fastens onto her, without the mother ever having actually been desired.'
These remarks caused a curious physical reaction in Sigmund Freud. He suffered a rush of blood to the arteries surrounding his cerebral cortex, which he experienced as a heaviness in his skull. He swallowed and said, 'You are denying the Oedipal complex?'
'Not at all. How could I? I invented the term.'
'The term complex is yours,' said Freud. 'You are retaining the complex but denying the Oedipal.'
'No!' cried Jung. 'I am preserving all your fundamental insights. Neurotics do have an Oedipal complex. Their neurosis causes them to believe that they sexually coveted their mother.'
'You are saying there are no actual incestuous wishes. Not among the healthy.'
'Not even among the neurotic! It is marvelous. The neurotic develops a mother complex because his libido is forced into its infantile channels. Thus the neurotic gives himself a delusive reason to castigate himself. He feels guilty over a wish he never had.'
'I see. What then has caused his neurosis?' asked Freud.
'His present conflict. Whatever desire the neurotic is not admitting to. Whatever life task he can't bring himself to face.'
'Ah, the present conflict,' said Freud. His head was no longer heavy. Instead, a peculiar lightness had come to him. 'So there is no reason to delve into the patient's sexual past. Or, indeed, his childhood at all.'
'Exactly,' said Jung. 'I have never thought so. From a purely clinical perspective, the present conflict is what must be uncovered and worked through. The reactivated sexual material from childhood can be excavated, but it is a lure, a trap. It is the patient's effort to flee from his neurosis. I am writing it all up now. You will see how many more adherents psychoanalysis will gain by reducing the role of sexuality.'
'Oh, eliminate it altogether – then we shall do even better,' said Freud. 'May I ask you a question? If incest is not actually desired, why is it taboo?'
'Taboo?'
'Yes,' said Freud. 'Why would there be an incest prohibition in every human society that has ever existed, if no one has ever wished it?'
'Because – because – many things are taboo that are not actually desired.'
'Name one.'
'Well, many things. There is a long list,' said Jung.
'Name one.'
'So – for example, the prehistoric animal cults, the totems, they – ah -' Jung was unable to finish his sentence.
'May I ask you one thing more?' said Freud. 'You say this insight came to you through the interpretation of a dream. I wonder what the dream was. Perhaps another interpretation is possible?'
'I did not say through the interpretation of a dream,' Jung replied. 'I said in a dream. Indeed, I was not quite asleep.'
'I don't understand,' said Freud.
'You know the voices one hears at night, just prior to sleep. I have trained myself to attend to them. One of them speaks to me with ancient wisdom. I have seen him. He is an old man, an Egyptian Gnostic – a chimera, really – called Philemon. It was he who revealed the secret to me.'
Freud did not answer.
'I am not cowed by your hints of incredulity,' said Jung. 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Herr Professor, than are dreamt in your psychology.'
'I daresay. But to be led by a voice, Jung?'
'Perhaps I am giving you the wrong impression,' Jung replied. 'I do not accept Philemon's word without reasons. He made his case through an exegesis of the primitive mother cults. I assure you, I did not believe it at first. I put several objections, each of which he was able to answer.'
'You converse with him?'
'Obviously you are unhappy with my theoretical innovation.'
'I am concerned about its source,' said Freud.
'No. You are concerned about your theories, your sexual theories,' said Jung, his indignation visibly rising. 'So you change the subject and try to bait me into a conversation about the supernatural. I won't be baited. I have objective reasons.'
'Given to you by a spirit?'
'Just because you have never experienced such phenomena does not mean they don't exist.'
'I grant that,' said Freud, 'but there must be evidence, Jung.'
'I have seen him, I tell you!' Jung cried. 'Why is that not evidence? He wept describing to me how the pharaohs scratched their fathers' names from the monumental stelae a fact I did not even know but which I later confirmed. Who are you to say what is evidence and what is not? You assume your conclusion: he does not exist; therefore what I see and what I hear does not count as evidence.'
'What you hear. It is not evidence, Carl, if only one person can hear it.'
A strange sound began to emanate from behind the sofa on which Freud sat: a creaking or groaning, as if there were something in the wall trying to get out. 'What is that?' asked Freud.
'I don't know,' said Jung.
The creaking grew louder until it filled the room. When it reached what sounded like a breaking point, it gave way to a splintering crack, like a clap of thunder.
'What on earth?' said Freud.
'I know that sound,' said Jung. A triumphant gleam came to his eyes. 'I have heard that sound before. There is your evidence! That was a catalytic exteriorization.'
'A what?'
'A flux within the psyche manifesting itself through an external object,' explained Jung. 'I caused that sound!'
'Oh, come, Jung,' said Freud. 'I think it may have been a gunshot.'
'You are mistaken. And to prove it, I will cause it again this instant!'
The moment Jung uttered this remarkable pronouncement, the groan began anew. In just the same fashion, it rose to an unbearable peak and then erupted with a tremendous report.
'What do you say now?' asked Jung.
Freud said nothing. He had fainted and was slipping off the sofa.
Detective Littlemore, hustling up from the Canal Street docks, put it all together. It was the first murder he had ever uncovered. Mr Hugel was going to be in heaven.
It wasn't Harry Thaw at all; it was George Banwell, from beginning to end. It was Banwell who killed Miss Riverford and stole her body from the morgue. Littlemore imagined Banwell driving to the river's edge, dragging the dead body out onto the pier, and descending the elevator down to the caisson. Banwell would have had the key to unlock the elevator door. The caisson was the perfect place to dispose of a corpse.
But Banwell would have assumed he was alone in the caisson. How stunned he must have been to discover Malley. How could Banwell have explained coming down in the middle of the night with a dead body in tow? He couldn't have explained it, so he had to kill him.
The blockage in Window Five, and Banwell's reaction to it, sealed the proof. He wouldn't want anybody discovering what had jammed up Window Five, would he?
The detective saw it all as he raced breathlessly along Canal Street – all except for the big black and red car, a Stanley Steamer, slowly trading him half a block behind. In his mind's eye, as he crossed the street, Littlemore saw his promotion to lieutenant; he saw the mayor himself decorating him; he saw Betty admiring his new uniform; but he didn't see the Steamer's sudden lurch forward. He didn't see the vehicle swerving slightly in order to hit him dead on, and of course he couldn't see himself tumbling through the air, his legs taken out by the car's fender.
The body lay sprawled out on Canal Street as the car sped away down Second Avenue. Among the horrified onlookers, a number shouted imprecations at the fleeing hit- and-run driver. One called him a murderer. A patrolman happened to be on the corner. He rushed to the fallen Littlemore, who had enough strength to whisper something in the officer's ear. The patrolman frowned, then nodded. It took ten minutes, but a horse-drawn ambulance finally appeared. They did not bother with a hospital; rather, they took the detective's body directly to the morgue.
Jung grasped Freud under the shoulders and laid him down on the sofa. Freud looked to Jung suddenly old and powerless, his fearsome faculty of judgment now as limp as his dangling arms and legs. Freud came to within a few seconds. 'How sweet it must be,' he said, 'to die.'
'Are you ill?' Jung asked.
'How did you do that? That noise?'
Jung shrugged.
'I will reconsider parapsychology – you have my word,' said Freud. 'Brill's behavior. I'm deeply sorry. He doesn't speak for me.'
'I know.'
'For a year I have placed too great a demand on you to keep me informed of your doings,' said Freud. 'I know it.
I will withdraw the excess libido, that I promise you too. But I'm worried, Carl. Ferenczi saw your – village.'
'Yes, I have found a new way to rekindle the memories of childhood. Through play. I used to build whole towns when I was a boy.'
'I see.' Freud sat up, handkerchief to his forehead. He accepted a glass of water from Jung.
'Let me analyze you,' said Jung. 'I can help you.'
'Analyze me? Ah, my fainting just now. It was neurotic, you think?'
'Of course.'
'I agree,' said Freud. 'But I already know its cause.'
'Your ambition. It has made you blind, horribly blind. As I have been.'
Freud took a deep breath. 'Blind, you mean, to my fear of being dethroned, my resentment of your success, my unstinting efforts to keep you down?'
Jung started. 'You knew?'
'I knew what you would say,' said Freud. 'What have I done to warrant that charge? Have I not advanced you at every turn, referred my own patients to you, cited you, credited you? Have I not done everything in my power for you, even at the price of injuring old friends, conferring on you positions I could have retained for myself?'
'But you undervalue the most important thing: my discoveries. I have solved the incest problem. It is a revolution. Yet you belittle it.'
Freud rubbed his eyelids. 'I assure you I do not. I appreciate its enormity all too well. You told us a dream you had on board the George Washington. Do you remember? You are deep in a cellar or cave, many levels below ground. You see a skeleton. You said the bones belonged to your wife, Emma, and her sister.'
'I suppose,' said Jung. 'Why?'
'You suppose?'
'Yes, that's right. What of it?'
'Whose bones were they really?'
'What do you mean?' asked Jung.
'You were lying.'
Jung didn't reply.
'Come,' said Freud, 'after twenty years of seeing patients prevaricate, you think I can't tell?'
Still Jung made no answer.
'The skeleton was mine, wasn't it?' said Freud.
'What if it was?' said Jung. 'The dream told me I was surpassing you. I wished to spare your feelings.'
'You wished me dead, Carl. You have made me your father, and now you wish me dead.'
'I see,' said Jung. 'I see where you are going. My theoretical innovations are an attempt to overthrow you. That's what you always say, isn't it? If anyone disagrees with you, it can only be a neurotic symptom. A resistance, an Oedipal wish, a patricide – anything but objective truth. Forgive me, I must have been infected with a desire to be understood intellectually for once. Not diagnosed, just understood. But perhaps that is not possible with psychoanalysis. Perhaps the real function of psychoanalysis is to insult and cripple others through subtle whispering about their complexes – as if that were an explanation of anything. What an abysmal theory!'
'Listen to what you are saying, Jung. Hear your voice. I ask you only to consider the possibility, just the possibility, that your "father complex" – your own words – is at work here. It would be a terrible pity for you to make a public pronouncement of views whose true motivations you saw only later.'
'You asked if we could speak honestly,' said Jung. 'I for one intend to. I see through you. I know your game. You ferret out everyone else's symptoms, every slip of their tongue, aiming continually at their weak spots, turning them all into children, while you stay on top, reveling in the authority of the father. No one dares tweak the Master's beard. Well, I am not in the least neurotic. I am not the one who fainted. I am not incontinent. You said one true thing today: your fainting was neurotic. Yes, I have suffered from a neurosis – yours, not mine. I think you hate neurotics; I think analysis is the outlet for it. You turn us all into your sons, lying in wait for some expression of aggression from us – which you have made certain will occur – and then you spring, shouting Oedipus or death wish. Well, I don't give a damn for your diagnoses.'
There was perfect silence in the room.
'Of course you will take all this as criticism,' said Jung, a note of diffidence creeping into his voice, 'but I speak out of friendship.'
Freud took out a cigar.
'It is for your own good,' said Jung. 'Not mine.'
Freud finished his glass of water. Without lighting his cigar, he stood and walked to the hotel room door. 'We have an understanding, we analysts, among ourselves,' he said. 'No one need feel any embarrassment about his own bit of neurosis. But to swear that one is the picture of health, while behaving abnormally, suggests a lack of insight into one's illness. Take your freedom. Spare me your friendship. Good-bye.'
Freud opened the door for Jung to pass through. As he did so, Jung had a final remark. 'You will see what this means to you. The rest is silence.'
Gramercy Park was unreasonably cool and peaceful. I remained on the bench a long time after she ran off, staring at her house, then at my Uncle Fish's old house around the corner, which I used to visit as a boy. Uncle Fish never let us use his key to the park. At first I had the confused idea that, since Nora went home with the key, I would not be able to get out. Then I realized the key must be for getting in, not out.
Though it was hateful to me in every possible way, I was obliged at last to concede the truth of Freud's Oedipus theory. I had held out against it so long. To be sure, several of my patients had produced confessions onto which I could have imposed an Oedipal interpretation. But I had never had a patient admit, point-blank, without interpretive gloss, to incestuous desires.
Nora had admitted hers. I expect I admired her self- awareness. But I was irredeemably repulsed.
'To a nunnery, go.' I was thinking of Hamlet's repeated injunction to Ophelia, right after 'to be, or not to be,' to get herself to a convent. Would she be 'a breeder of sinners'? he asks her. 'Be thou as chaste as ice… thou shalt not escape calumny.' Would she paint her face? 'God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.'
I think my heart's reasoning was as follows: I knew I could not stand to touch Nora now. I could hardly stand to think of her – that way. But I was damned if I would stand the thought of any other man touching her either.
I know how irrational my reaction was. Nora wasn't responsible for what she felt. She didn't choose to have incestuous desires, did she? I knew this, but it changed nothing.
I rose from the bench, running my hands through my hair. I made myself concentrate on the medical aspects of the case. I was still her doctor. Clinically speaking, Nora's admission that she had witnessed last night's assault from above was much more important than her acknowledgment of her Oedipal wishes. I had told her that such experiences were common in dreaming, but when combined with the very real cigarette burn on her skin, her account sounded closer to psychosis. She probably needed more than analysis. In all likelihood, she ought to be hospitalized. Get thee to a sanatorium.
Nevertheless, I could not bring myself to believe that she had inflicted the initial set of wounds – the brutal whipping she suffered Monday – on herself. Nor was I prepared to acknowledge as a certainty that last night's attack was an hallucination. Some memory associated with medical school flashed in and out of my head.
New York University was not far downtown. As it turned out, the gate to Gramercy Park was indeed locked shut. I had to climb out – and felt, unaccountably, like a criminal as I did so.
Walking through Washington Square, I crossed under Stanford White's monumental arch and wondered at the murderousness of love. What else might the great architect have built if he hadn't been gunned down by a mad, jealous husband, the same man whom Jelliffe was trying to have released from the asylum? Down the street was New York University's excellent library.
I began with Professor James's work on nitrous oxide, which I already knew well from Harvard, but saw nothing there meeting the description. The general anaesthesiology texts were one and all useless. So I turned to the psychical literature. The card catalog had an entry on astral projection, but it proved to be a piece of theosophical raving. Then I came across a dozen entries under bilocation. Through these, after a couple of hours of digging, I finally found what I was looking for.
I was fortunate: Durville provided several references in his just-published book on apparitions. Bozzano had reported a highly suggestive case, and Osty an even clearer one in the May-June Revue Metapsychique. But it was a case I found in Battersby that eliminated all doubt. Battersby quoted the following account:
I struggled violently so that two nurses and the specialist were unable to hold me… The next thing I knew was some piercing screaming going on, that I was up in the air and looking down upon the bed over which the nurses and doctor were bending. I was aware that they were trying in vain to stop the screaming; in fact I heard them say: 'Miss B., Miss B., don't scream like this. You are frightening the other patients.' At the same time I knew very well that I was quite apart from my screaming body, which I could do nothing to stop.
I didn't have a telephone number for Detective Littlemore, but I knew he worked in the new police headquarters downtown. If I could not find him there in the flesh, at least I would be able to leave word.
In the Van den Heuvel building, a messenger boy ran up to Coroner Hugel's office to announce that an ambulance had just delivered another dead body to the morgue. Unmoved, the coroner dismissed the boy; but the youngster wouldn't go. It wasn't just any body, the boy said, it was Detective Littlemore's body. The coroner, surrounded by boxes and loose papers stacked in piles all over his floor, swore and ran down to the basement faster than the boy himself.
Littlemore's body was not in the morgue. It was in the laboratory antechamber, where Hugel did his autopsies. The detective had been wheeled in on a gurney and deposited on one of the operating tables. The ambulance men were already gone.
Hugel and the messenger boy froze at the sight of the detective's twisted body. Hugel took the boy's shoulder in too tight a grip.
'My God,' said the coroner. 'It's all my fault.'
'No, it isn't, Mr Hugel,' said the body, opening its eyes.
The messenger boy screamed.
'Martin fucking Luther!' said Hugel.
The detective sat up and brushed off his lapels. He saw on the coroner's face a mixture, in roughly equal parts, of lingering grief and accumulating fury. 'Sorry, Mr Hugel,' he said sheepishly. 'I just thought we might have an ace in the hole if the guy who wanted to kill me thought he had pulled it off.'
The coroner stalked away. Littlemore leapt from the table; the moment he hit the floor, he cried out in pain. His right leg was much worse than he had realized. He followed at Hugel's heels, describing his theory of the death of Seamus Malley.
'Preposterous' was Hugel's reply. He continued up the stairs, refusing even to look back at Littlemore, limping up behind him. 'Why would Banwell, having killed this Malley, drag his dead body into the elevator? For company on the ride up?'
'Maybe Malley dies on the way up the elevator.'
'Oh, I see,' said the coroner. 'Banwell kills him in the elevator, then leaves him there in order to maximize the probability of his being apprehended for two murders. Banwell is not stupid, Detective. He is a calculating man. Had he done what you claim, he would have taken the elevator straight back down to the caisson and disposed of this Malley in the same way you say he disposed of the Riverford girl.'
'But the clay, Mr Hugel, I forgot to tell you about the clay -'
'I don't want to hear it,' said the coroner. They had arrived at his office. 'I don't want to hear any more about it. Go to the mayor, why don't you? No doubt you'll find a ready audience with him. I told you, the case is closed.'
Littlemore blinked and shook his head. He noticed the stacks of documents and the packing boxes spread out on the office floor. 'Are you going somewhere, Mr Hugel?'
'As a matter of fact, I am,' said the coroner. 'I'm quitting this employ.'
'Quitting?'
'I cannot work under these conditions. My conclusions are not respected.'
'But where will you go, Mr Hugel?'
'You think this is the only city that requires a medical examiner?' The coroner surveyed the boxes of records strewn about his office. 'I understand a position is available in Cleveland, Ohio, as a matter of fact. My opinions will be valued there. They will pay me less, of course, but that is no matter; I have a substantial sum set aside already. No one will be able to complain about my records, Detective. My successor will find a perfectly organized system – which I created. Do you know what the state of the morgue was before I came here?'
'But Mr Hugel,' said the detective.
At that moment, Louis Riviere and Stratham Younger appeared in the corridor. 'Monsieur Littlemore!' cried Riviere. 'He's alive!'
'Unfortunately,' agreed the coroner. 'Gentlemen, if you'll excuse me, I have work to do.'
Clara Banwell was cooling herself in a bath when she heard the front door slam shut. It was a Turkish bath, with blue inlaid Mudejar tiles from Andalusia, installed in the Banwells' apartment at Clara's special request. As her husband's voice bellowed her name from the entry hall, she wrapped herself hastily in two white bath towels, one for her torso and another around her hair.
Still dripping, she found her husband in their forty-five- foot living room, a tumbler in his hands, gazing out at the Hudson River. He was pouring himself a bourbon over ice. 'Come here,' said Banwell from across the room, without turning around. 'You saw her?'
'Yes.' Clara remained where she was.
'And?'
'The police believe she did the injury to herself. They believe she is either mad or pursuing a vendetta against you.'
'What did you tell them?' he asked.
'That you were here at home all night.'
Banwell grunted. 'What does she say?'
'Nora's very fragile, George. I think -'
The sound of a whiskey bottle banging down on a glass- topped table interrupted her. The table didn't crack, but alcohol splashed from the bottle's mouth. George Banwell turned to face his wife. 'Come here,' he said again.
'I don't want to.'
'Come here.'
She obeyed. When she was close to him, he glanced down.
'No,' she said.
'Yes.'
She undid her husband's belt. While she extracted the belt from the loops of his trousers, he poured himself another drink. She handed him the black leather strop. Then she lifted up her hands, palms together. Banwell corded the belt around her wrists, threaded its buckle, pulled it tight. She winced.
He jerked her to him and tried to kiss her lips. She allowed him to kiss only the corners of her mouth, turning her cheek first one way, then the other. He buried his head in her bare neck; she took in a mouthful of air. 'No,' she said.
He forced her to her knees. Though bound by the belt, she could move her hands well enough to unfasten her husband's trousers. He tore the white towel from her body.
Sometime later, George Banwell sat on the davenport, fully dressed, sipping bourbon, while Clara, naked, knelt on the floor, her back to her husband.
'Tell me what she said,' he instructed her, loosening his tie.
'George' – Clara turned and looked up at him – 'couldn't it be over now? She is only a little girl. How can she hurt you any more?'
She sensed immediately that her words had fueled, rather than dampened, her husband's latent anger. He rose to his feet, buttoning himself. 'Only a little girl,' he repeated.
The Frenchman must have had a soft spot for Detective Littlemore. He kissed him on both cheeks.
'I got to play dead more often,' said Littlemore. 'This is the nicest you've ever been to me, Louie.'
Riviere pressed a large folder into the detective's arms. 'It came out perfectly,' he said. 'I have surprised even myself, actually. I did not expect such detail in an enlargement. Very unusual.' With this, the Frenchman withdrew, calling out that it was au revoir, not adieu.
I was now alone with the detective. 'You – played dead?' I asked him.
'It was just a joke. When I came to, I was in an ambulance, and I got the idea it might be funny.'
I reflected. 'Was it?'
Littlemore looked around. 'Pretty funny,' he said. 'Say, what are you doing here?'
I told the detective I had made a discovery potentially important to Miss Acton's case. Suddenly, however, I found I wasn't sure how to put things. Nora had experienced a form of bilocation – the phenomenon of seeming to be in two places at the same time. From my Harvard days, I dimly remembered reading about bilocation in connection with some of the early experiments with the new anaesthetics that had so altered surgical medicine. My research confirmed it: I was now convinced that Nora had been given chloroform. By morning, there would have been no odor and no significant after-effects.
My problem was that Nora had confessed to me that she hadn't told Detective Littlemore anything about the strange way in which she experienced the event. She had been afraid he wouldn't believe her. I decided to be direct: 'There was something Miss Acton didn't tell you about last night's assault. She saw it – that is, she experienced her own participation in it and her own observation of it – as if she were external to it.' Hearing my own lucid words, I realized I had chosen about the least accessible, least convincing explanation possible. The look on the detective's face did nothing to change that impression. I added, 'As if she were floating above her own bed.'
'Floating above her own bed?' Littlemore repeated.
'That's right.'
'Chloroform!' he said.
I was dumbfounded. 'How on earth did you know that?'
'H. G.Wells. He's my favorite. He's got this story where that exact same thing happens to a guy getting operated on after they put him under with chloroform.'
'I've just wasted an afternoon in the library.'
'No, you didn't,' said the detective. 'You can back it up – scientifically, I mean? The chloroform-floating thing?'
'Yes. Why?'
'Listen, file this for one second, okay? I got to check something while we're here. Can you come with me?' Littlemore set off along the corridor and down the stairs, limping badly. Over his shoulder, he explained. 'Hugel's got some real good microscopes down here.'
In the basement, we came to a small forensic laboratory, with four marble slab tables and medical equipment of excellent quality. From his pockets, the detective took out three small envelopes, each containing bits of a ruddy earth or clay. One of the samples, he explained to me, came from Elizabeth Riverford's apartment, another from the basement of the Balmoral, and the third from the Manhattan Bridge – on a pier belonging to George Banwell. These three samples he pressed onto separate glass slides, which he then placed under separate microscopes. He moved from one to the other rapidly. 'They match,' he said, 'all three of them. I knew it.'
Then he opened up Riviere's folder. The photograph, I could now see, showed a girl's neck marked with a dark, grainy round spot. It was, if I understood the detective correctly, which I may not have done, a reversed image of the picture of an imprint they had found on the neck of the murdered Miss Riverford. Littlemore examined this photograph carefully, comparing it to a man's gold tiepin that he withdrew from another pocket. He showed the pin to me – it bore the monogram GB - and invited me to compare the pin and the photograph.
I did so. With the tiepin in hand, I could see the outline of an unmistakably similar ligature insignia in the dark round spot in the photograph. 'They're alike,' I said.
'Yup,' said Littlemore, 'almost identical. Only problem is, according to Riviere, they shouldn't be alike. They should be opposites. I don't get that. Know where we found that tiepin? In the Actons' backyard. To me, that pin proves Banwell was at the Actons', climbing a tree, maybe, to get in Miss Acton's window.' He sat down on a chair, his right leg evidently too sore for him to stand on. 'You still think it was Banwell, right, Doc?'
'I do.'
'You got to come with me to the mayor's office,' said the detective.
Smith Ely Jelliffe, lodged comfortably in a front-row seat at the Hippodrome, the world's largest indoor theater, wept quietly. So did most of his fellow playgoers. The spectacle so moving to them was the solemn march of the diving girls, sixty-four in all, into the seventeen-foot-deep lake that was part of the Hippodrome's gigantic stage. (The water in the lake was real; underwater air receptacles and subterranean corridors provided an escape route backstage.) Who could keep tears away as the lovely, dignified, bathing- suited girls disappeared into the rippling water, never to see Earth again, doomed to perform forever for the Martian king in his circus so far away from home?
Jelliffe's bereavement was alleviated by the knowledge that he would be seeing two of the girls again – and shortly. A half hour later, with a high-heeled diving girl on each arm, Jelliffe strode with considerable satisfaction into the colonnaded dining room of Murray's Roman Gardens on Forty- second Street. Behind Jelliffe trailed two long pink boas, one from each of his girls. Before him stood the Gardens' massive, leafy plaster columns, rising up to the ceiling a hundred feet overhead, where electric stars twinkled and a gibbous moon crossed the firmament at an unnaturally advanced clip. A triple-decker Pompeiian fountain discoursed in the center of the restaurant, while nude maidenly figures frolicked in the trompe-l'oeil distance on every wall.
By weight, Jelliffe was worth both his diving girls put together. He believed this middle-aged girth made him a most impressive man – to the female sex, that is. He took special pleasure in his diving girls because he was anxious to make an impression tonight. He was dining with the Triumvirate. They had never asked him to dinner before. The closest he had come to their inner circle was the occasional luncheon at their club. But his stock had plainly risen with his connections to the new psychotherapeutics.
Jelliffe did not need money. What he wanted was renown, esteem, standing, prestige – all of which the Triumvirate could give him. It was they, for example, who directed Harry Thaw's lawyers to him, giving Jelliffe his first taste of fame. The grandest day of his life was the day his portrait appeared in the Sunday papers, naming him 'one of the most distinguished alienists in the state.'
The Triumvirate had also taken a surprisingly close interest in his publishing house. They were obviously progressive men. At first they had barred him from accepting any articles mentioning psychoanalysis, but their attitude had changed. Roughly a year ago, they instructed Jelliffe to send them the abstracts of all submissions touching on Freud, notifying him afterward of the ones they sanctioned. It was the Triumvirate who advised him to publish Jung. It was they who encouraged him to take on Brill's translation of Freud's book when it looked like Morton Prince in Boston might publish it instead. Indeed, they had hired Jelliffe an editor to help smooth Brill's translation.
Jelliffe had considered carefully the number of girls to bring to dinner. Girls were his specialty. He had cemented more than a few social and professional connections with such mortar. He knew all the best gentlemen's establishments. When asked, he invariably recommended the Players Club in Gramercy Park. With the Triumvirate, Jelliffe had never been asked. When, however, they invited him to join them at the Roman Gardens, Jelliffe sensed the occasion was propitious. As every man-about-town knew, upstairs at the Gardens were twenty-four luxuriously appointed bachelor's apartments, each of which contained a double-sized bed, separate bath, and a bottle of champagne on ice. At first, Jelliffe had pictured four girls and four rooms, but on reflection this seemed insufficiently collegial. So he had secured two of each: the business of taking turns, he felt, would add sauce to the geese.
Jelliffe did make an impression, but not the one he intended. Shown to the private alcove where the Triumvirate had their table, the bon vivant and his ladies met with an unequivocal froideur from the three gentlemen seated there. None of them even stood. Jelliffe, failing to detect the cause, manfully greeted his hosts, called out to the ma î tre d' for extra chairs, and announced that two bachelor's suites awaited them all after dinner. With a wave of an elegant hand, Dr Charles Dana belayed the order for extra chairs. Jelliffe finally grasped the nettle and mumbled to his girls that they had better wait for him upstairs.
Shortly thereafter, the Triumvirate procured from Jelliffe the information that Abraham Brill had, without warning, indefinitely postponed publication of Freud's book. Pity, said Dana. And what of Dr Jung's lectures at Fordham? Jelliffe reported that his plans for the Fordham lectures were proceeding apace – and that the New York Times had contacted him to arrange an interview with Jung.
Dana turned to the portly fellow with the muttonchop sideburns. 'Starr, weren't you interviewed by the Times as well?'
Draining an oyster into his mouth, Starr said he bloody well had been interviewed and that he had been blunt about it too. The conversation then turned to Harry Thaw, concerning whom Jelliffe was advised in no uncertain terms that there should be no further experiments.
As the dinner drew to a close, Jelliffe feared he had not advanced his cause. Dana and Sachs did not even shake his hand as they left. But his flagging spirits improved when Starr, who had lingered behind the others, asked whether he had correctly heard Jelliffe to say that he had booked two rooms upstairs. Jelliffe confirmed it. The brace of corpulent gentlemen regarded each other, both picturing a boa-clad showgirl reclining next to an iced, unopened bottle of champagne. Starr expressed the opinion that things paid for ought not to be wasted.
'Have you lost your mind, Detective?' asked Mayor McClellan behind the closed doors of the mayor's office Thursday evening.
Littlemore had requested a crew of men to go down to the Manhattan Bridge caisson to investigate the malfunctioning window. He and I were seated across from the mayor's desk. McClellan was now standing.
'Mr Littlemore,' said McClellan, who had evidently inherited his father's military bearing, 'I promised this city a subway, and I delivered it. I promised this city Times Square, and I delivered it. I promised this city the Manhattan Bridge, and by God I'm going to deliver it if it's the last damned thing I do in office. Under no circumstances is the work on that bridge to be hindered – not by one single goddamned minute. And under no circumstances is George Banwell to be interfered with. Do you hear me?'
'Yes, sir,' said Littlemore.
'Elizabeth Riverford was murdered four days ago and, so far as I can tell, all you've done since is lose her blasted body.'
'Actually, I found a body, Your Honor,' said Littlemore meekly.
'Oh, yes, Miss Sigel,' said McClellan, 'who is now causing me more trouble than even Miss Riverford. Have you seen the afternoon papers? It's all over them. How can the mayor of this city allow a girl of good family to be found in a Chinaman's trunk? – as if I were personally responsible! Forget about George Banwell, Detective. Find me this William Leon.'
'Your Honor, sir, with all respect,' said Littlemore, 'I think the Riverford and Sigel cases are connected. And I think Mr Banwell is involved in both.'
McClellan folded his arms. 'You think this Leon was not Miss Sigel's killer?'
'I think it's possible, sir.'
The mayor took a deep breath. 'Mr Littlemore, your Mr Chong – the man you yourself arrested – confessed an hour ago. His cousin Leon killed Miss Sigel last month in a jealous rage, after he saw her with another Chinaman. The police have been to this other man's home, where they found more letters from Miss Sigel. Leon strangled her to death. Chong witnessed it. He even helped put the dead body into Leon's trunk. All right? Are you satisfied?' 'I'm not sure, sir,' said Littlemore.
'Well, you'd better make yourself sure. I want answers. Where is Leon? Was Miss Acton attacked last night or not? Was she ever attacked at all? Do I have to do everyone's job? And let me tell you one more thing, Detective,' said McClellan. 'If you or anyone else comes running into my office yapping that Elizabeth Riverford was murdered by the one man I know could not have killed her, I'm going to fire the lot of you. Do I make myself clear?' 'Yes, sir, Your Honor, sir' was the detective's reply. We were mercifully released. Out in the hallway, I said, 'So at least the mayor is squarely behind us.'
'I didn't lose Miss Riverford's body,' objected Littlemore, showing uncharacteristic spleen. 'What's come over everyone? I've got a tiepin, the clay, an unexplained death on the guy's site, he fits the coroner's description, he scares when he sees Miss Acton, she tells us he attacked her, and we can't even go down and see what's blocking the guy's underwater garbage chute?'
I made the obvious point that if Banwell was out of town the night Elizabeth Riverford was murdered, he couldn't have killed her.
'Yeah, but maybe he's got an accomplice who did it,' replied Littlemore. 'Know anything about the bends, Doc?'
'Yes. Why?'
'Because I know what I got to do,' said Littlemore, whose limp had grown still worse, 'but I can't do it by myself. Will you help me?'
When I heard the detective's proposal, I initially thought it the most foolhardy plan I had ever heard. On reflection, however, I began to think differently.
Nora Acton stood on the roof of her house. A breeze stirred the fine wisps of hair dangling over her forehead. She could see the whole of Gramercy Park, including the bench where, several hours ago, she had sat with Dr Younger. She doubted she would ever sit there with him again.
She could not bear to be inside her house. Her father was locked in his study. Nora had an idea what he did in there. Not work: her father had no work. Years ago, she had found her father's secret cache of books. Revolting books. Outside, two patrolmen were once again guarding the front and back doors. They had left the house this morning; now they were back.
Nora wondered whether she would die if she jumped from the roof. She thought not. The girl went back into her house and down to the kitchen. She picked through a deep bottom drawer and found one of Mrs Biggs s carving knives. She took it upstairs and placed it under her pillow.
What could she do? She couldn't tell anyone the truth, and she couldn't lie any longer. No one would believe her. No one did believe her.
Nora did not intend the kitchen knife for use on herself. She had no wish to die. She might, however, at least try to defend herself if he came again.